As a writer, director and comic-book maker, Joss Whedon - creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - is a bit of an oddity.

He's got a huge fan base, a track record that includes both the popular and the critically acclaimed, and is hailed by many as a god of all things pop-cultural. And yet every time he comes up with some- thing new, people (particularly TV critics) can't wait to call it a failure.

His new series, sci-fi thriller Dollhouse, which has just started showing in the US, is no exception.

The concept is complex. At some unidentified point in the future, there is a cadre of people known as "dolls" - individuals who have had their entire memories and personalities wiped so that they can be rented out for engagements (fantasies, crimes or, ahem, other purposes).

Personalities and skills get implanted into dolls when on engagements; the rest of the time they live as a tabula rasa, blank slates with childlike innocence. Leading us into this world is Echo (Eliza Dushku), another powerful young female character Whedon has built a world around.

The LA Times found it emotionally empty - understandable when your main character hasn't got a personality to speak of. The New Yorker described Dushku's main qualification as having "graduated with honours from the Royal Academy of Cleavage".

Luke Howitt, a moderator for the fan community Whedonesque.com, admits Dollhouse is "quite different" to his previous shows. "It's less of a genre-bender, and more a straight mystery genre with sci-fi elements," he says. "It's also less goofy, more realistically violent and, yeah, probably touches seamier aspects of slavery, prostitution, and so on. It's a hard sell, frankly."

And it is. The first episode had a mixed-to-bad reaction, while the second episode was pacier, wittier and more engaging but still violent, and hard to get a moral fix on. Whedon's created a complex universe, and you can see how it would enable ever more complex relationships, and layered storylines . . . if it gets enough time. Dollhouse is shown on the mainstream US TV network Fox rather than a cable channel such as HBO, where shows such as The Wire are treated with patience by audiences, critics and TV executives - because they accept it's a long game.

Dollhouse needs time for its personality to develop, but Whedon just can't seem to win, whatever he does. As Whedonesque owner Caroline van Oosten de Boer says: "Some critics - professional and amateur - just simply do not like genre TV and never will."

Of course, if the show does stumble (or worse, gets cancelled) the same people will be among the first to decry the tragedy, and hail it a neglected classic - without mentioning that they killed it in the first place.

• This article was amended on Monday 2 March 2009. In the above article we misspelled Luke Howitt's name as Howlitt. This has been corrected.